The Elder Thoughts

When I found Escape from New York Vol. 1: Escape from Florida I thought "great! one of my all-time favourite movies has a comic sequel!". After reading this first volume, I'm quite dissapointed and will just ignore everything except the two movies.

A comic with weak characters, cheap winks and references to the movies, a bland plot that mostly tries to recreate the badass attitude of Pliskin by placing him in another dystopic scenario, but only this time is sometimes boring, sometimes plainly dull, and in general doesn't makes me want to keep reading. I just finished it to leave the review.

Maybe I had different expectations (more alike to the movies), but it is a significant departure in scenarios and plot and just reusing the main character doesn't makes it the same.

I'm lagging behind my proposal of painting more, but I cannot fight arriving tired from work. Tired enough to prefer not to paint, but not so exhausted to leave the computer out, so I've been playing some videogames as of lately. Related with this blog usual topics (RPGs, Warhammer, etcetera.), I've played three games.

First and most interesting to me, Space Hulk: Deathwing, an FPS in the line of Left4Dead or Warhammer: Vermintide, both with singleplayer and cooperative play. This has been the big revelation for me: I preordered it due to a discount, and while it is true that performance-wise it needs some fine-tunning (lags when there are too many enemies at once even with a high end 3D card), it still looks awesome and the developers and designers must be fans of Warhammer 40,000 because the scenarios, lore and details of the maps are simply amazing. It won't please everybody, but I loved it and just finished the campaign, so I'll now try multiplayer before another pass to try to obtain all relics and read all logs.

Then, I also recently finished Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, new entry in this saga and the second game since Square Enix reboot. I did loved the previous game (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) because of how much it redefined the original game in such a pleasing way, so maybe I had too high hopes for this new entry. While certainly it is a good game, it has two issues for me:

It is very very similar to previous one. This is good but also bad, as there are not many surprises here

The story and some secondary characters sometimes feel cut, uncomplete, as if fragments were left for DLCs/expansions. I don't own any DLC so is just a theory, but I felt when I finished there were a bunch of unclosed or unsatisfying "branches"

It is also very demanding regarding 3D power, and while the scenarios are soo beautiful and insanely detailed cyberpunk cities, sometimes really gets sluggish.

And lastly, my most mixed feelings go to Fallout 4. After more than 70 hours on Fallout 3, all its DLCs and some custom mods, I was so happy to have a new entry and truth be old, I've grown tired of it even before finishing the main story arc. Yes it has settlements and NPCs inhabiting them; yes you build from furniture and food to weapon and armor modifications; yes the map is big and more detailed and alive and full of missions; yes everything is prettier and more realistic. But it all feels yet quite similar to Fallout 3, as a mixture of mods with a graphics bump and some (a bit dull so far) story of a lost child and you of course frozen in a vault for some years and then waking up. I will come back to it in the future to play more and try to finish the plot, but it broke my expectations on the wrong side.

Maybe I'm just growing tired of playing same sagas and need to switch to new IPs with unkown settings and new lore, but it's getting dissapointing playing new entries of existing game worlds...

Reordering my books I found and re-read The Art of Mass Effect, released on 2007 just after the first videogame in the Mass Effect universe.

Along its pages we'll mostly find colour illustrations, a few pencil sketches and some CGIs and actual game screenshots. There are some "multi step" drawings (from pencil to final results) but not too many. The main themes are scenarios, ships/vehicles and characters.

Being an art book not much else can be said. If you love the Mass Effect universe and lore this is a great source of inspiration. The first game, despite its defects, was a great experience for me and even now I think is the best one regarding story (the series went more into action although the visuals got really amazing), and this book evocates those experiences.

Fans of the game and people seeking really cool sci-fi drawings will find here what they seek.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the original Neverwhere so I can't compare.

Neverwhere is a comic about a normal guy, with a normal, boring life, that by chance meets Door, a girl trying to escape from two killers who have assassinated her family and are searching for her, and that is able to open doors between the "normal" world and other in which other rules are at play. Their life will never be the same again as they try to find who and why is trying to kill Door, gathering some help.

A curious reading, the drawing is ok, the story has some twists and (quite some) violence, but in general it didn't "clicked" on me enough to feel it was a pleasure reading. I'll be passing it to some friend because is not a comic I'll go back anytime soon.